Glasshouse

by Charles Stross

  “Hmm.” I can tell when I’m being stroked for a hard sell. “You’ll have to tell me more about it.”

  “Certainly. One moment?” I can tell Piccolo-47 is going into quicktime and messaging someone else: its focus of attention wanders—I can see the sensor peripherals unfocusing—and the manipulator root stops shimmering. “I have taken the liberty of transmitting your public case profile to the coordination office, Robin. The experiment I allude to is a cross-disciplinary one being conducted by the departments of archaeology, history, psychology, and social engineering within the Scholastium. Professor Yourdon is its coordinator-general. If you volunteer to participate, a copy of your next backup—or your original, should you choose total immersion—will be instantiated as a separate entity within an experimental community, where it will live alongside roughly a hundred other volunteers for thirty to a hundred megaseconds.” Roughly one to three old-style years. “The community is designed as an experiment to probe certain psychological constraints associated with life prior to the censorship wars. An attempt to reconstruct a culture that we have lost track of, in other words.”

  “An experimental society?”

  “Yes. We have limited data about many periods in our history. Dark ages have become all too frequent since the dawn of the age of emotional machines. Sometimes they are unintentional—the worst dark age, at the dawn of the emotional age, was caused by the failure to understand informational economics and the consequent adoption of incompatible data representation formats. Sometimes they’re deliberate—the censorship wars, for example. But the cumulative result is that there are large periods of history from which very little information survives that has not been skewed by observational bias. Propaganda, entertainment, and self-image conspire to rob us of accurate depictions, and old age and the need for periodic memory excision rob us of our subjective experiences. So Professor Yourdon’s experiment is intended to probe emergent social relationships in an early emotional-age culture that is largely lost to us today.”

  “I think I see.” I shuffle against the stonework and lean back against the fountain. Piccolo-47’s voice oozes with reassurance. I’m pretty sure it’s emitting a haze of feel-good pheromones, but if my suspicions are correct it won’t have thought of the simple somatic discomforts I can inflict on myself to help me stay alert. The pitter-patter of icy droplets on my neck is a steady irritant. “So I’d, what, go live in this community for ten megs? And then what? What would I do?”

  “I can’t tell you in any great detail,” Piccolo-47 admits, its tones conciliatory and calm. “That would undermine the integrity of the experiment. Its goals and functions have to remain uncertain to the subjects if it is to retain any empirical validity, because it is meant to be a living society—a real one. What I can tell you is that you will be free to leave as soon as the experiment reaches an end state that satisfies the acceptance criteria of the gatekeeper, or if the ethics committee supervising it approves an early release. Within it, there will be certain restrictions on your freedom of movement, freedom of access to information and medical procedures, and restrictions on the artifacts and services available to you that postdate the period being probed. From time to time the gatekeeper will broadcast certain information to the participants, to guide your understanding of the society. There is a release to be notarized before you can join. But we assure you that all your rights and dignities will be preserved intact.”

  “What’s in it for me?” I ask bluntly.

  “You will be paid handsomely for your participation.” Piccolo-47 sounds almost bashful. “And there is an extra bonus scheme for subjects who contribute actively to the success of the project.”

  “Uh-huh.” I grin at my therapist. “That’s not what I meant.” If he thinks I need credit, he’s sadly mistaken. I don’t know who I was working for before—whether it really was the Linebarger Cats or some other, more obscure (and even more terrifying) Power—but one thing is certain, they didn’t leave me destitute when they ordered me to undergo memory excision.

  “There is also the therapeutic aspect,” says Piccolo-47. “You appear to harbor goal-dysphoria issues. These relate to the almost complete erasure of your delta block reward/motivation centers, along with the associated memories of your former vocation; bluntly, you feel directionless and idle. Within the simulation community, you will be provided with an occupation and expected to work, and introduced to a community of peers who are all in the same situation as you. Comradeship and a renewed sense of purpose are likely side effects of this experiment. Meanwhile you will have time to cultivate your personal interests and select a direction that fits your new identity, without pressure from former associates or acquaintances. And I repeat, you will be paid handsomely for your participation.” Piccolo-47 pauses for a moment. “You have already met one of your fellow participants,” he adds.

  A hit.

  “I’ll think about it,” I say noncommittally. “Send me the details and I’ll think about it. But I’m not going to say yes or no on the spot.” I grin wider, baring my teeth. “I don’t like being pressured.”

  “I understand.” Piccolo-47 rises slightly and moves backward a meter or so. “Please excuse me. I am very enthusiastic for the experiment to proceed successfully.”

  “Sure.” I wave it off. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I really do need some privacy. I still sleep, you know.”

  “I will see you in approximately one diurn,” says Piccolo-47, rising farther and rotating toward a hole that is irising open in the ceiling. “Goodbye.” Then it’s gone, leaving only a faint smell of lavender behind, and me to the strikingly vivid memory of the taste and feel of Kay’s tongue exploring my lips.

  2

  Experiment

  WELCOME to the Invisible Republic.

  The Invisible Republic is one of the legacy polities that emerged from the splinters of the Republic of Is, in the wake of the series of censorship wars that raged five to ten gigaseconds ago. During the wars, the internetwork of longjump T-gates that wove the subnets of the hyperpower together was shattered, leaving behind sparsely connected nets, their borders filtered through firewalled assembler gates guarded by ferocious mercenaries. Incomers were subjected to forced disassembly and scanned for subversive attributes before being rebuilt and allowed across the frontiers. Battles raged across the airless cryogenic wastes that housed the longjump nodes carrying traffic between warring polities, while the redactive worms released by the Censor factions lurked in the firmware of every A-gate they could contaminate, their viral payload mercilessly deleting all knowledge of the underlying cause of the conflict from fleeing refugees as they passed through the gates.

  Like almost all human polities since the Acceleration, the Republic of Is relied heavily on A-gates for manufacturing, routing, switching, filtering, and the other essentials of any network civilization. The ability of nanoassembler arrays to deconstruct and replicate artifacts and organisms from raw atomic feedstock made them virtually indispensable—not merely for manufacturing and medical purposes, but for virtual transport (it’s easier to simultaneously cram a hundred upload templates through a T-gate than a hundred physical bodies) and molecular firewalling. Even when war exposed them to subversion by the worms of censorship, nobody wanted to do without the A-gates—to grow old and decrepit, or succumb to injury, seemed worse than the risk of memory corruption. The paranoid few who refused to pass through the verminous gates dropped away, dying of old age or cumulative accidental damage; meanwhile, those of us who still used them can no longer be certain of whatever it was that the worm payloads were designed to hide in the first place. Or even who the Censors were.

  But the stress of the censorship caused people to distrust all gates that they didn’t control themselves. You can’t censor data or mass flowing through a T-gate, which is simply a wormhole of twisted space-time connecting two distant points. So even short-range traffic switched to T-gates, while new mass assemblies became scarce because of generalized distrust
of the Censored A-gates. There was an economic crash, then a splintering of communications, and entire T-gate networks—networks with high degrees of internal connectivity, not necessarily spatial proximity—began to disconnect from the wider net. Is became Was, and what was once a myriad of public malls with open topologies sprouted fearsome armed checkpoints, frontier posts between firewalled virtual republics.

  That was then, and this is now. The Invisible Republic was one of the first successor states to form. They built an intranetwork of T-gates and fiercely defended them from the outside until the first generation of fresh A-gates, bootstrapped painfully all the way from hand-lithographed quantum dot arrays, became available. The Invisibles started out as a group of academic institutions that set up a distributed trust system early in the censorship; they still retain their military-academic roots. The Scholastium views knowledge as power and seeks to restore the data lost during successive dark ages—although whether it is really a good idea to uncover the cause of the censorship is a matter of hot debate. Just about everyone lost parts of their lives during the war, and tens of billions more died completely: Re-creating the preconditions for the worst holocaust since the twenty-third century is not uncontroversial.

  Ironically, the Invisible Republic is now the place where many people come in order to forget their pasts. We who remain human (while relying on A-gate redaction to save our bodies from senescence) sooner or later need to learn to forget. Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life. But forgetting is a fraught process, one that is prone to transcription errors and personality flaws. Delete the wrong pattern, and you can end up becoming someone else. Memories exhibit dependencies, and their management is one of the highest medical art forms. Hence the high status and vast resources of the surgeon-confessors, into whose hands my earlier self delivered me. The surgeon-confessors learned their skills by forensic analysis of the damage done to the victims of the censorship wars. And thus, yesterday’s high crime leads to today’s medical treatment.

  A few diurns—almost half a tenday—after my little chat with Piccolo- 47, I am back in the recovery club, nursing a drink and enjoying the mild hallucinations it brings on in conjunction with the mood music the venue plays for me. It’s been voted a hot day, and most of the party animals are out in the courtyard, where they’ve grown a swimming pool. I’ve been studying, trying to absorb what I can of the constitution and jurisprudential traditions of the Invisible Republic, but it’s hard work, so I decided to come here to unwind. I’ve left my sword and dueler’s sash back home. Instead, I’m wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility—woven in free fall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I’m told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist. I feel pretty good about myself because my most recent therapist-assignee, Lute-629, says I’m making good progress. Which is probably why I’m not sufficiently on guard.

  I’m sitting alone at a table minding my own business when, without any kind of warning, two hands clap themselves over my eyes. I startle and try to stand up, tensing in the first instinctive move to throw up a blocking forearm, but another pair of hands is already pressing down on my shoulders. I realize who it is only just in time to avoid punching her in the face. “Hello, stranger,” she breathes in my ear, apparently unaware of how close I came to striking her.

  “Hey.” In one dizzy moment I smell her skin against the side of my cheek as my heart tries to lurch out of my chest, and I break out in a cold sweat. I reach up carefully to stroke the side of her face. I’m about to suggest she shouldn’t sneak up on me, but I can visualize her smiling, and something makes me take a more friendly tone. “I was wondering if I’d see you here.”

  “Happens.” The hands vanish from my eyes as she lets go of me. I twist round to see her impish grin. “I’m not disturbing anything important, am I?”

  “Oh, hardly. I’ve just had my fill of studying, and it’s time to relax.” I grin ruefully. And I would be relaxing if you weren’t giving me fight-or-flight attacks!

  “Good.” She slides into the booth beside me, leans up against my side, and snaps her fingers at the menu. Moments later a long, tall something or other that varies from gold at the top to blue at the bottom arrives in a glass of flash-frozen ice that steams slightly in the humid air. I can see horse-head ripples in the mist, blue steam-trails of self-similarity. “I’m never sure whether it’s polite to ask people if they want to socialize—the conventions are too different from what I’m used to.”

  “Oh, I’m easy.” I finish my own drink and let the table reabsorb my glass. “Actually, I was thinking about a meal. Are you by any chance hungry?”

  “I could be.” She chews her lower lip and looks at me pensively. “You said you were hoping to see me.”

  “Yes. I was wondering about the, uh, greeter thing. Who runs it, and whether they need any volunteers.”

  She blinks and looks me up and down. “You think you’re sufficiently in control? You want to volunteer to—remarkable!” One of my external triggers twitches, telling me that she’s accessing my public metadata, the numinous cloud of medical notes that follow us all around like a swarm of phantom bees, ready to sting us into submission at the first sign of undirected aggression. “You’ve made really good progress!”

  “I don’t want to be a patient forever.” I probably sound a bit defensive. Maybe she doesn’t realize she’s rubbed me up the wrong way, but I really don’t like being patronized.

  “Do you know what you’re going to do when your control metrics are within citizenship bounds?” she asks.

  “No idea.” I glance at the menu. “Hey, I’ll have one of whatever she’s drinking,” I tell the table.

  “Why not?” She sounds innocently curious. Maybe that’s why I decide to tell her the unembellished truth.

  “I don’t know much about who I am. I mean, whoever I was before, he put me in for a maximum wash, didn’t he? I don’t remember what my career was, what I used to do, even what I was interested in. Tabula rasa, that’s me.”

  “Oh my.” My drink emerges from the table. She looks as if she doesn’t know whether to believe me or not. “Do you have a family? Any friends?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admit. Which is a white lie. I have some very vague memories of growing up, some of them vivid in a stereotyped way that suggests crude enhancement during a previous memory wash—memories I’d wanted to preserve at all costs, two proud mothers watching my early steps across a black sandy beach . . . and I have a strong but baseless conviction that I’ve had long-term partners, at least a gigasecond of domesticity. And there are faint memories of coworkers, phantoms of former Cats. But try as I might, I can’t put a face to any of them, and that’s a cruel realization to confront. “I have some fragments, but I’ve got a feeling that before my memory surgery I was pretty solitary. An organization person, a node in a big machine. Can’t remember what kind of machine, though.” Fresh-spilled blood bubbling and fizzing in vacuum. Liar.

  “That’s so sad,” she says.

  “What about you?” I ask. “Before you were an ice ghoul . . . ?”

  “Oh yes! I grew up in a troupe, I had lots of brothers and sisters and parents. We were primate fundamentalists, you know? It’s kind of embarrassing. But I still hear from some of the cousins now and then—we exchange insights once in a while.” She smiles wistfully. “When I was a ghoul, it was one of the few things that reminded me I had an alien side.”

  “But did you, when you were a ghoul, did you have . . . ?”

  Her face freezes over: “No, I didn’t.” I look away, embarrassed for her. Why did I imagine I was the only liar at the table?

  “About that food idea,” I say, hastily changing the subject, “I’m still trying out some of the eateries around here. I mean, getting to know what’s good and figuring out who hangs out
where. I was thinking about going for a meal and maybe seeing if a few acquaintances are around afterward, Linn and Vhora. Do you know them? They’re in rehab, too, only they’ve been out a bit longer than us. Linn’s doing craft therapy, ad hoc environmental patching, while Vhora’s learning to play the musette.”

  “Did you have anywhere in particular in mind to go and eat?” She unfreezes fast once we’re off the sensitive subject.

  “I was thinking a pavement cafe in the Green Maze that hangs off the back of the Reich Wing looked like a possibility. It’s run by a couple of human cooks who design historically inauthentic Indonesian tapas in public. It’s strictly recreational, a performance thing: They don’t actually expect you to eat their prototypes—not unless you want to.” I raise a finger. “If that doesn’t interest you, there’s a fusion shed, also in the Green Maze, that I cached yesterday. They do a decent pan-fried calzone, only they call it something like a dizer or dozer. And there’s always sushi.”

  Kay nods thoughtfully. “Plausible,” she agrees. Then she smiles. “I like the sound of your tapas. Shall we go and see how much we can eat? Then let’s meet these friends of yours.”

  They’re not friends so much as nodding acquaintances, but I don’t tell her that. Instead, I pay up with a wave at the billpoint, and we head for the back door, out onto the beautiful silvery beach that the rehab club backs on to, then over to a rustic-looking door that conceals the gate to the green maze. Along the way, Kay pulls a pair of batik harem pants and a formally cut black-lace jacket out of her waist pouch, which is an artfully concealed gate opening on a personal storage space. Both of us are barefoot, for although there is a breeze and bright sunlight on our skin, we are fundamentally as deep indoors as it is possible for humans to get, cocooned in a network of carefully insulated habitats floating at intervals of light kiloseconds throughout a broad reach of the big black.